Nathan Hare, a sociologist who helped lead a five-month strike by college and college students at what’s now San Francisco State College, leading to an settlement in 1969 to create the nation’s first program in Black research, with him as its director, died at a hospital in San Francisco on June 10. He was 91.
His dying was confirmed by the poet and playwright Marvin X, a detailed buddy of Dr. Hare’s.
A son of Oklahoma sharecroppers who was educated within the state’s segregated faculties and later on the College of Chicago, Dr. Hare was a number one determine in bringing the concepts of Black energy into educational circles, first at Howard College after which at San Francisco State Faculty (now College), and later as a co-founder of The Black Scholar, a number one interdisciplinary journal.
He thought of himself a Black nationalist, and in all three roles he clashed with each the institution administrations and different factions on the political left, significantly Marxists.
Dr. Hare was pressured out of his job at Howard in 1967 after a public battle with its president, who wished to just accept extra white college students. The following yr, he arrived at San Francisco State, which already had programs in “minority research,” and instantly started pushing for an interdisciplinary program devoted to learning the Black expertise.
He additionally bristled on the time period “minority research” and pushed again at its use by coining the time period “ethnic research.”
The administration resisted, resulting in a five-month strike in 1968 and ’69 by college and college students — who, Dr. Hare incessantly identified, had been principally white, although their ranks additionally included future Black figures just like the actor Danny Glover and the politician Ron Dellums.
Two presidents had been pressured to resign over the strife. A 3rd, interim president, S. I. Hayakawa, cracked down on the protests by permitting police to arrest a whole bunch of them. However in early 1969 he and the protest leaders reached an settlement that included the creation of a Black research program, to be led by Dr. Hare. (Dr. Hayakawa was later made everlasting president and served as a U.S. senator from 1977 to 1983.)
The peace didn’t final lengthy. After Dr. Hare insisted that the division was not a standard educational unit however a revolutionary device, Dr. Hayakawa fired him.
Dr. Hare returned to campus that fall, asserting that he was the rightful division head; he even tried to carry his personal courses. However the college ultimately pressured him out, and he left academia for good.
“Nathan was the agent who symbolized this nice battlefront with the mainstream,” Abdul Alkalimat, a professor emeritus of African American research and library science on the College of Illinois, stated by cellphone. “And just like the Marines, you’re taking successful, and also you create the opportunity of those that come after you.”
Later in 1969, Dr. Hare joined the poet Robert Chrisman and Allan Ross, a printer, to discovered The Black Scholar in Oakland (right this moment it’s printed by Boston College). In interviews, he described it as a discussion board for connecting artists, activists and intellectuals with the rising “ebony tower” of Black research, feeding it concepts and arguments.
The journal shortly grew to become one of many main Black mental publications, with essays by thinkers like Amiri Baraka and Angela Davis. Dr. Alkalimat served on its board.
“The Black Scholar was the main journal of Black mental thought,” the poet and novelist Ishmael Reed, a frequent contributor, stated in an interview. A part of its success, he stated, was that “it didn’t come off like an instructional journal.”
Dr. Hare resigned in 1975, citing a flip towards Marxism by the remainder of the journal’s management, on the expense of Black nationalism. “That majority is now Black Marxist, and I quickly discovered my contribution sabotaged and virtually liquidated,” he advised The New York Instances on the time.
Nathaniel Hare was born on April 9, 1933, in Slick, Okla., southwest of Tulsa, to Seddie and Tishia (Lee) Hare.
His mother and father separated when Nathan was younger. Throughout World Warfare II, his mom moved him and his siblings to San Diego, the place she labored as a janitor on a naval base and the place Nathan developed an curiosity in boxing. When he expressed curiosity in going skilled, his mom moved them again to Oklahoma.
Regardless of his continued curiosity within the pugilistic arts, he excelled at school and was accepted into Langston College, the one traditionally Black faculty in Oklahoma. He labored full time as a janitor to pay his means and graduated with a bachelor’s diploma in sociology in 1955.
Dr. Hare married a fellow Langston scholar, Julia Reed, in 1956. She died in 2019. He had no fast survivors.
He went on to check sociology on the College of Chicago, receiving a grasp’s diploma in 1957 and his doctorate in 1962.
He joined the college at Howard, in Washington, in 1961. Town was a middle of civil rights activism, whereas lots of his college students, together with the organizer Stokely Carmichael and the author Claude Brown, had been getting ready to push the battle in a radical, separatist path.
Dr. Hare agreed with them, and shortly discovered himself at odds with the college, which had prided itself as an engine of progress for the Black bourgeoisie. His first e-book, “Black Anglo-Saxons” (1965), was a searing critique of the Black center class.
Issues got here to a boil in 1967, when Howard’s president, James Nabrit Jr., advised The Washington Publish that he aspired to spice up the college’s white enrollment to nicely over half the coed physique.
Dr. Hare wrote a reducing response that not solely took Mr. Nabrit to process but additionally referred to as for a brand new method to Black greater schooling, one directed by Black college and college students. He additionally invited the boxer Muhammad Ali to talk on campus, a transfer opposed by Mr. Nabrit due to Ali’s antiwar stance.
Dr. Nabrit pressured Dr. Hare to resign in 1967, after which San Francisco State supplied him a place.
Following his departure from San Francisco State and The Black Scholar, Dr. Hare took up a profession in medical psychology, receiving a second doctorate from the California College of Skilled Psychology in 1975.
Together with operating a non-public psychology follow, Dr. Hare and his spouse based a analysis establishment, the Black Assume Tank, which printed a sequence of books on Black life in America, a number of of which he wrote himself, together with “The Endangered Black Household” (1984).
In 2019, Dr. Hare obtained a lifetime achievement honor from the American Ebook Awards, which cited “Black Anglo-Saxons” and “The Endangered Black Household” as keystone texts within the canon of Black research.
